Songfacts®:

• My Morning Jacket have spent years climbing the ladder in the music industry. Since releasing their debut album, The Tennessee Fire, in 1999, they've toured relentlessly, only stopping to record new albums every few years before hitting the road again. But frontman Jim James still feels like he's on the bottom rung when it comes to romantic relationships. He explained how the sentiment inspired "Climbing The Ladder" to Pandora Stories:
  
  "This song is about still paying my dues, still trying to figure it out - the difference between climbing the ladder in your profession and how that can be going good or going bad, but really at the time, all I wanted was this relationship to work out, and it wasn't working out, so I was just thinking about that a lot. I can try to climb this ladder as much as I want, but what I really want is for this relationship to work out. You can work for it, but you can't force it to happen."
• The band wrote so many songs during their sessions for The Waterfall in Stinson Beach, California, they nearly released them all as a triple album in 2015 but decided it would be too overwhelming for listeners. While promoting the release, James teased that a sequel album with the unreleased songs would drop soon and would differ thematically from its predecessor. In reality, it would take another five years to see a release and it followed the original's central theme of rebirth.